Fujifilm X-T1: Retro Looks With Hi-Tech Guts

The much-leaked Fujifilm X-T1 is now officially official, and will surely be a sell-out success when it goes on sale next month for $1,300 (body only). It’s an SLR-style camera with an electronic viewfinder, Fujifilm’s trademark (16.3MP) X-Trans sensor, a metal body and a whole mess of mechanical knobs and dials.

Retro-looking it may be, but that’s only becasue we’ve gotten used to lazy and cheap manufacturers skipping easy-to-use mechanical controls in favor of easy-to-fabricate menu-driven black boxes. Up top you get five (5!) dials: two stacked knobs for shutter speed, ISO sensitivity, metering and drive modes, plus a single-level dial for exposure compensation. It’s also peppered with function buttons that can be assigned various tasks.

Fujifilm claims that the X-T1 has the world’s fastest AF, but I’ve heard that one before. It also has a high-res, 2.36M-dot OLED electronic finder, with a display that can rotate to be upright when shooting vertical photos.

The weather-sealed, freeze-proof body also has Wi-Fi, which can be toggled with a button on the top plate. This lets you remote-control the camera from Fujifilm’s app, or to transfer pictures to your iPad in the field.

I’m still more than happy with my Fujifilm X100S, but if I was into buying an interchangeable-lens camera then I’d be all over the X-T1. It really does look amazing. The only thing I don’t like? No optical viewfinder. But then, that’s what the X100S is for.